Reading + Interview with Sabrina Jaszi

Note: This is an edited transcription of a longer interview, which is available in full here (music by Nicolaas Stulting):

Tell us about your relationship to translation, especially between Russian + English.

I’ve always been a massive reader and lover of language and words. And once I had even the smallest foothold in Russian, I just felt like I had special access to literature; I couldn’t be stopped from translating it, however poorly equipped I was at that time. Over the years I’ve begun translating other languages: Uzbek and Ukrainian, which are kind of adjacent to Russian. I’ve always just been the type of person who wanted to bring attention to underexposed literatures and authors, and I just felt like there’s so much to discover in these languages and cultures. Russian literature is wonderful, but it has been done, or many aspects of it have been. So most of the Russian translation I do these days are of Russophone writers from post-Soviet cultures, like Suhbat Aflatuni. He’s from Uzbekistan, but he’s one of these writers who writes in Russian in order to gain access to larger readership. Obviously, many people across the world speak Russian—it’s an imperial language. And at the same time, he and other authors that I translate actively seek to carve out a space for non-Russian literature within the Russian language. So kind of the idea that Russian isn’t just for Russian people.

How did this lead to you becoming co-founder of the Turkoslavia Journal?

Turkoslavia is a translation collective and journal that I started with Ena Selimović and Mirgul Kali. It started out as just three translators working from Bosnian (or BCMS, as it’s called), Kazakh, and Uzbek, Russian, and Ukrainian. Working in these Turkic and Slavic languages, we realized how much there was in common, how much historical overlap, linguistic overlap, and cultural overlap… It was just really fun to sit and workshop each other’s translations together, because translation can be quite solitary and lonely and discouraging, because you’re acting as an agent as well as a creative actor, and there’s a lot of rejection involved. So it became really helpful to have this community to just keep going and validate each other.

And then at one point, Mirgul was at the University of Iowa in their translation MFA program, and she got the opportunity to use their platform to start the Turkoslavia journal. So that’s something that we’ve been doing ever since, I think, since 2022 and we’ve just published our fifth issue, and we publish authors and translators from the Turkic and Slavic world, very broadly defined. It’s been a great project to create a community, establish this linguistic territory that hadn’t been too much talked about, I think, before. In terms of plans for the future: we’re going to do an anthology this year, that’s our big project.

Is this also how you met Suhbat Aflatuni/decided to translate “Bulbul”?

It’s a funny story. I knew of Aflatuni—he’s a big writer/poet. He’s sort of like an influential figure. He started this thing called the Tashkent School, which was this movement of poets after 1991 that, in Uzbekistan, were trying to theorize and make Central Asian Russophone literature “happen” in a certain way. So he had been written a little bit about by academics; that’s how I first learned about him. (And I think he was on my PhD reading list, that I made for myself.)

But then I was at the big Slavic conference in Philadelphia a few years ago, and I was at a panel on Central Asian literature, and I got to talking with this very soft spoken, nice professor from Central Asia, and I took down his name. Only later did I realize that it was Suhbat Aflatuni, who was there under his real name. Suhbat Aflatuni is his pen name (it means “Plato’s dialogues” in Uzbek, which tells you something about him immediately). So after the conference, I emailed him and asked him to contribute to Turkoslavia, and he sent me this incredible story called “The Mistle Thrush,” which my co-editor, Ena, and I then co-translated for the third issue, I believe, and I’ve been translating him ever since. He’s one of my favorite authors to translate.

Do you have any advice related to translation or writing?

This is not exactly advice, but, my philosophy is to sort of go toward lesser translated languages and cultures, the ones that have, like, three dictionaries and a grammar book from 1962. I think this type of difficulty means that there’s treasure to be unearthed and there’s work to be done. And also, you know, translate what you love, even if readers of English don’t love it yet.

What are you working on now?

More stories by Aflatuni. And I’ve kind of started on his first novel, which is called Tashkent Novel. I’ve also been working on short stories by a contemporary writer named Salomat Vafo who writes in Uzbek and dialect. And these are very different from Aflatuni’s writing, even though they’re two writers who were born around the same time, who live probably ten minutes away from each other in Tashkent. But just really, really different in interesting ways. I’m also finishing up a translation of Semyon Lipkin’s novel Dekada, which is forthcoming with Georgetown University Press.

SABRINA JASZI is a translator, editor, and writer in California. Her translation with Roman Ivashkiv of Andriy Sodomora’s The Tears and Smiles of Things (Academic Studies Press) won the American Association for Ukrainian Studies’ Translation Prize. Her work has been published by the New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, The Dial, AGNI, and others. Translating from Uzbek, Ukrainian, and Russian, she is a founding member of the Turkoslavia translation collective and journal.